When the known galaxies and stars in the right panel are subtracted, what remains is the cosmic infrared background shown at left. Astronomers have determined much of this haze is from stars in the dark matter halos of early galaxies.

The search for the earliest galaxies in the Universe is ongoing. Since these galaxies are far removed from us in time, they are very faint and very red-shifted, making it hard to determine how many there were and where they were distributed. To find these galaxies, some astronomers are looking at the Universe’s infrared background across large patches of the sky. Fluctuations in the temperature of this infrared background are likely indicators of the first galaxies, which heated and ionized much of the gas in the Universe.

A new observation using data from the Spitzer infrared space telescope has found the expected signature of distant, faint galaxies. However, the magnitude of the fluctuations was surprisingly high: these early galaxies appeared bigger and brighter than expected from theory and observations at other wavelengths. In a new Nature paper, Asantha Cooray and colleagues suggest that much of this infrared radiation came from stars in the galactic halos, which were thought to be mostly dark matter.

Typical galaxies such as the Milky Way have two basic parts: the luminous portion (which is what we usually think of as the galaxy), and a dark matter halo that envelops it and contains most of the mass. Even though most of a galaxy’s stars are in the luminous portion, the halo does contain a substantial number of stars, although they’re at a much lower density. Recent studies have shown that halo stars contribute more to the total light profile of a galaxy than we previously thought.

Nithin Mathews, Anders Lyhne Christensen, Rehan O’Grady, and Marco Dorigo are researchers from Universite Libre de Bruxelles and Instituto Universitario de Lisboa and they are leading us down the primrose path towards human extinction. More precisely, they’re using a method called specially-targetted communication. The flying robot “selects” ground robots and communicates with them by changing LED colors. Once the airborne robot sends the right signals to the ground robots, they can work together to move over and around obstacles that the ground robots cannot see.

Most important is that fact that no real “wireless” communication is necessary here, unless you count the LEDs as a form of electromagnetic signaling. Instead, the flying robots can tell the ground robots to do what they do best – self-assemble – and then guide them where they need to go.

You really have to see the video to understand it, but it’s some seriously wild robot interaction. The method requires no GPS, no maps, and no outside control. The flying robots just need to know what the environment looks like and the ground robots just have to follow orders. It’s amazing stuff.

Colocation data center Macminicolo has already gotten its hands on the new Mac mini, putting all three stock models through benchmarking tests and sharing initial impressions of the machines.

Geekbench results, which focus strictly on processor and memory performance, show a marginal increase in performance for the entry-level machine compared to the previous generation, with more substantial gains coming in the higher-end models tapping into quad-core Ivy Bridge processors. Early impressions of the latest models include:

– Don’t look now, but the new Mac minis are getting comparable to the last gen Xserve and 2010 Mac Pros as far as benchmarks. Tech progress marches on.

– All Mac minis now come standard with 4GB of RAM. Thank goodness. As of last week, the base Mac mini had 2GB of RAM and that was brutal with Mountain Lion.

– The Mac mini can officially be upgraded to 16GB now. It’s been possible for over a year, but it had to be done after ordering. Now, Apple offers the 16GB of RAM.

– The base mini is still i5, but the middle and high end minis are quad core i7 Ivy Bridge processors. That middle mini is the most interesting. Many customers prefer the quad core for things like an Xcode build server or for plenty of cores to spread between virtual machines. That $799 Mac mini is going to be very popular.

– The machines now come with 1600MHz DDR3 Memory. Seriously, 16GB of 1600MHz RAM in such a small machine. It’s really quite amazing.

Another colocation center, Mac Mini Vault, has also taken a look at the new Mac mini, noting that their machine arrived running a custom Build 12B2080 of OS X 10.8.1. The company also performed a quick teardown of the machine, noting that Apple has tweaked the fan design since last year’s model and also made some changes to the wireless antennas.

More than a month after a French court convicted its first three-strikes offender under the anti-P2P regime known as Hadopi, the French government will be continuing the controversial program into 2013. And despite a reduced budget, Hadopi will also begin policing pirated video games, in addition to films and music.

According to a recently released government document (French, PDF) entitled “2013 Report on Independent Public Authorities,” Hadopi’s annual budget will be reduced from €10.3 million ($13.36 million) to €8 million ($10.37 million) in 2012. The agency’s 2011 budget was €11.4 million.